


i'll dive into the sky

by bodhirookes



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Confused and easily amazed Shane Madej, Love at First Sight, M/M, Merman Ryan Bergara, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, also all the other BF employees are just briefly mentioned, and Shane's like that's dope! but doesn't believe in any of them, basically Shane's wacky aunt tells him stories about supernatural creatures, they have no part in this fic at all, this is really insta-lovey and Disney my bad, until he does
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 18:59:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16001336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bodhirookes/pseuds/bodhirookes
Summary: Shane's amazingly weird aunt raised him on stories about mythical creatures, like vampires and werewolves and faeries and mermaids, but he stopped believing in them after he grew up. Now he just likes to listen to and read the stories as a way to escape the everyday struggles of being a college student who rooms with Keith Habersberger.That is, until he finds out for himself that maybe his Aunt Jenny was actually recounting some nonfiction tales to him.AKA Shane finds an injured merman on the beach one afternoon and promptly loses his shit.





	i'll dive into the sky

**Author's Note:**

> This is another fic I wrote up in between ‘show me what i’m looking for’ chapters while doing warm-ups and shuffling my music. I actually wrote this before ‘hard liquor’ but that fic had a lot more meat and bone than this one until I went back in and stitched it together better, and voila, there is now a mermaid au written by yours truly! I loved writing this because I’ve got a fantasy-obsessed grandma who’s a lot like Shane’s aunt and I love the beach and I love merpeople and I love Ryan Steven Bergara and Shane Alexander Madej so good shit all around. This fic is also a little bit ridiculous and insta-lovey but that’s just a part of the charm of Disney romances, you know? So the romance is a little sudden but I can’t bring myself to care that much lmfao here’s the gist of what Ryan’s tail looks like in my head, it’s not exact but it’s p close: https://www.freepngimg.com/download/mermaid_tail/3-2-mermaid-tail-transparent.png
> 
> I listened to Dustin Tebutt’s The Breach EP a lot while writing this because it’s got smooth beachy vibes, and I also drew inspiration for this story from the song Hurricane by MSMR, which is the song that got shuffled out in the little exercise and prompted me to write this fic. 
> 
> Title is from the song The Sea by MØ because I’m an idiot and a sucker for songs about water
> 
> I haven’t mentioned this yet but my fics are all un-beta’d and I do all of the editing so sorry if there are any mistakes still creeping around in here!!
> 
> *edit 9/23/18: HOLY SHIT THERE'S FUCKING FANART FOR THIS FIC NOW!!!! WHAT THE FUCK!!!!! I DON'T KNOW WHAT I DID TO DESERVE THIS BUT AN AMAZING AND LOVELY HUMAN BEING MADE FANART FOR THIS FIC AND IT'S FUCKING GORGEOUS AND RYAN LOOKS EXACTLY THE WAY I PICTURED HIM DOWN TO HIS TAIL SO WTF ;------; HERE IT IS BECAUSE I STILL CAN'T FIGURE OUT HOW TO PUT LINKS IN THE NOTES SECTION: http://void-bee.tumblr.com/post/178220703731/a-reeeeally-quick-doodle-from-bodhirookes-fic

Shane has a ridiculous and huge soft spot for his wacky Aunt Jenny.

It started when he was a young child; his earliest memories involve driving a few hours to see her up in some tiny little city in Michigan, before she moved to Maryland, and always being excited to see her pretty country house come into view. She liked living by herself in the outskirts of the city so that she had free reign to write and paint and garden without anyone bothering her. Scott was always so-so about their visits, but the first thing Shane ever knew about himself was that he loved visiting Aunt Jenny and her pretty, cozy house. When Scott went to sleep and their parents either also went to bed or went into town to visit with some friends, Jenny would always curl up with him on the couch or on the swing on her back porch, and she’d tell him stories.

She picked up on Shane’s obsession with hearing and telling stories very quickly, and loved to indulge in them. When Shane thinks about summer, he thinks about leaning into Aunt Jenny’s side and listening to her talk about witches and wizards and werewolves and vampires and fairies and dragons and mermaids and even the Kraken. He thinks about getting up early to watch the sun bleed reds and oranges and talking about phoenixes rising from their ashes, and watching the sun get swallowed up by blues and purples and talking about the Loch Ness Monster slithering around under the ocean somewhere.

When Shane was old enough to start reading, Aunt Jenny was the one who bought him _Harry Potter_ and _The Lord of the Rings,_ and when he started showing an interest in science fiction and aliens, _The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy._ It became their thing- Scott was more interested in sports and hanging out with his friends, and his parents were never big into fantasy and science fiction, so Aunt Jenny stepped up to the plate to feed Shane’s growing interest in them.

Even when she moved to Maryland to be close to the ocean, a dream of hers from childhood, Shane wasn’t deterred. He would save up chore money, birthday money, even Christmas money, and help his parents pay for a plane ticket to go spend a month with her in the summer. They’d spend as many days as they could reading and talking together, sometimes on the beach, and sometimes in her cute little beach house. Shane loved her more than anyone else in the world, and trusted her with his life.

But, for whatever reason, he didn’t truly believe in any of the things they loved together. He believed in them as a kid, but as he grew up, his genuine belief in the supernatural beings his aunt raised him on faded into pure enjoyment over fictional creatures.

“I don’t see what warrants you to dismiss the supernatural or the mythical, sweetheart.” she tells him one beautiful morning. Shane is twenty two and still visiting during the summer, now for as many weeks as he can get away with in between random summer internships and general college student hardships. They’re eating breakfast together and listening to the radio and Shane has lost count of the number of days he’s spent with her, has lost count of the amount he has left. They all seem to blend and swirl together like a long, hazy line of summer days and full body contentment. “For fuck’s sake, I raised you on the stories myself. I wouldn’t invest so much of my time and energy preaching about the beauty of the Fey and the danger of vampires if I didn’t think that they were real.”

Whenever Aunt Jenny says things like this, things that imply that she believes in every single thing she’s ever told Shane, he usually just smiles at her because he loves her for all of her quirky pieces.

“I’m not saying you can’t believe in them, Aunt Jenny- I’m just saying that I stopped believing in fairies when I was ten.”

“I can hear the way you said that.” She gives him The Eyes over her oatmeal, warm and loving despite their squabbling. “You’re saying fairies, but I’m talking about faeries. The kind that will screw you out of your first born child and make you dance until you die.”

“Like those people in France.”

Jenny gives him an exasperated look. “Shane Madej.”

He laughs. “I’m sorry- I still love those kinds of stories, but I just don’t believe in them. It doesn’t mean that they bring me any less joy. In fact, now that I know how extremely soul-sucking the adult world and living with fifteen thousand tired, cranky college students all around me is, I think that I appreciate those kinds of stories even more.”

The way her eyes sparkle makes Shane curious. He’s used to her slightly-manic looks, the ones she pairs with her warm smile and deep, pretty laugh, but he’s never seen her the way she’s looking at him right now. She looks like she usually does, wild and free and very loving, but there’s a little pinprick of mischief that he’s never really seen before.

“I think that someday, you’re going to see something that you can’t explain away with science and logic, and you’re going to have to sit back and ask yourself if your insane Aunt Jenny told you all of those stories as a kid to amuse you or to educate you.”

Shane blinks at her.

“I’m just saying,” she tells him, getting up to put her dishes in the sink. “One day, I bet all the books in my library that you’re going to see some extraordinary and everything you think you know about the world is going to change. And I bet my _house_ that it’ll be for the better, baby.”

He watches her putter around, the ball of warmth in his chest never shrinking, and instead of scoffing at her or telling her that she’s wasting her time, he just smiles and tells her: “Okay, Aunt Jenny. I’ll let you know if that ever happens. Maybe we can write a story about it together.”

It takes exactly eight days after this conversation for Shane to get schooled.

It’s one of the days he chooses to spend at the beach. After packing a book, his old but trusty iPod and speaker duo, a lunch, and his water bottle, he walks a few miles down to his favorite section of the beach by his aunt’s house, where there are no other people and he can see the ocean stretch out for miles without any boats to disturb it.

He spends an indefinite amount of time lounging in a beach chair and reading, the sound of the waves lapping on the shore and the quiet sound of music playing from his speaker lulling him into a trance. He reads one of the books Aunt Jenny gave him when he arrived a few weeks prior, some series about a quest to find the main character’s long lost brother, and the combination of warm sand on his toes, the scorching sun on his shoulders, and the smell of salt water makes him feel like he’s not even on Earth.

After he reads a little more than half of his book, he decides to go for a walk down to the boulder pile Jenny used to take him to as a kid so that they could go hunting for shells and cool rocks. He can grab her some shells for her bookshelves and stretch his legs at the same time; maybe he’ll find something cool to bring back to school for Sara and Zach, who are obsessed with trinkets.

This is, of course, when everything goes to shit. When he makes it to the boulders, he starts climbing over them to get to the ones that usually hold the best stones and shells. He’s singing to himself and thinking about maybe going swimming when he gets through the next 50 pages of his book. He’s minding his own fucking business, and then one second he’s thinking over a really pretty agate stone and the next he’s climbing over another boulder and finds-

“Holy shit,” Shane breathes, agate falling out of his hand without him noticing. “What the fuck-”

There’s a man laying face down on a stretch of sand next to the boulders, entire body tangled up in a fisherman’s net. It’s wrapped around him the same way that clothes get wrapped around the center of a washing machine, an intricate mess of snarled knots and gaping where the net should be stitched together. The only part of his body free from the net is his head, but the rest is ensnared: his shoulders, arms, torso, and-

Tail.

“What the absolute fucking fuck.” Shane, despite wanting to faint or possibly run as far away as he possibly can, starts to wobble his way over towards the- _merman_. Even through every single fight-or-flight instinct he has in his long, gangly body, he can see bruising on the merman’s skin and his eyes are honing in on where the net is twisted around his neck. He wants to pretend more than anything that this person is just someone who bought one of those weird slip-on mermaid tails, but as Shane gets closer to him, he can see exactly where his torso and tail meet and conjoin, the same as a pair of legs would. There is no mistaking that the tail is a piece of his body.

Thankfully, when he gets close enough, Shane can see that the merman is still breathing, despite being out of water. His shoulders rise and fall shallowly underneath the mess of the fishing net, strained but still there, and Shane feels a wild sense of relief as he gets close enough to touch the guy.  

He hesitates, but then proceeds to press his hand lightly against the merman’s shoulder.

“Hey, uh- are you alright? Can you hear me?”

The merman lets out a small, pained moan, but otherwise does nothing, and that’s when Shane notices the darkness of the sand underneath the merman’s stomach. Something turns sickly in his own stomach, and Shane uses his hand to carefully flip the merman over.

There are rope burns and mild laceration marks over his skin, alongside the bruising that originally caught his attention, and on the smooth curve of his belly, a gash that looks like it came from a knife. Shane invisions some jackass fisherman pulling this guy out of the water and trying to kill him, or tame him enough to take him to land, and the merman fighting back and eventually getting away. It’s not hard to imagine him winning a fight, going by the size of his enormous biceps and abdominal muscles. He doesn’t even know this fucking dude, but Shane feels something like pride bubble up when he thinks about the merman fighting against his attackers.

The rest of the man is- Shane feels bad for sitting and staring when the guy’s obviously in need of some help, but his brain feels a little broken. His jet black hair is wild and still damp, and part of it flops over into his closed eyes. His lips are a tense, pained line, and twitch whenever his chest rises too quickly and increases the pain he must be feeling from being washed up on shore. Shane stares and stares down at his face, and then takes a few seconds to stare and stare down at his tail, resembling a sunset with lots of ruby reds, fiery oranges, and rich, gleaming golds.

He’s the most gorgeous person (half person?) Shane’s ever seen in his short, normal life.

The merman makes another wheezy, pained noise, and it kicks Shane out of his amazed staring.

“Shit,” he curses, and scrambles away to find a rock sharp enough to cut through the net. “I’m sorry- I’m gonna get you out of there, I promise, just hang on a little bit longer.”

Shane’s almost positive that the merman hears nothing he’s saying, but he croaks lowly, maybe words or maybe just a sound, and Shane doubles his efforts. He eventually finds one that’s chipped and filed away on one side, and he smashes it against one of the boulders until a jagged edge forms that will- hopefully- cut through the ropes.

He both takes his time and hurries when cutting the ropes off of the merman, trying not to let his wandering eyes distract him from the task at hand. It takes longer than he’d like it to, but he works his way down from the merman’s shoulders to his tail and hacks and cuts until the net is off of him. As soon as the net falls away from his delicate fins, the merman makes another noise, and Shane decides his best plan of action is to pick the guy up as well as he can and take him back out into the ocean.

With the most care his awkward, too-long body can manage, Shane gently gathers the merman up into his arms without jostling his injured side. It takes every single ounce of strength to lift the muscular merman up, but he eventually gets a hold on him that’s secure enough that he won’t throw them both back onto the sand. He hardly feels the cold wash of water as he walks them both out into the ocean, and he keeps going until it’s deep enough for him to kneel down onto the sand without losing his footing or making it difficult for the merman to move his tail around. He sits back on his calves and keeps his arms curled loosely around the merman’s shoulders and torso. He’s not really sure what he expects to happen, when all that he knows about merpeople is that they belong in the water, so he’s hoping that this little piece of knowledge will be enough to help the injured merman at least regain consciousness.

He sits in the water for an endless amount of minutes, letting the merman soak up water through the gills in his tail and the ones discreetly positioned on his sides, watching his face shift and soften, and watching out for any incoming beach-goers or boaters. After some time, Shane watches as the wound in the merman’s side begins to slowly close, his eyes and mouth equally wide and his head spinning. The blood trickling out of it slowly comes to a stop, and then the wound begins to shrink and close until it’s nothing more than a shiny patch of pink skin. Shane distantly feels like he should be losing his shit, watching a fucking merperson heal through the ocean water, but instead of fear or rejection, he’s filled with a sense of wonder, just like when he was a kid and Aunt Jenny read to him about the adventures of Middle Earth. He thinks, very abruptly, that Aunt Jenny is going to fucking freak out when he tells her about this later.

The merman’s shallow breathing becomes deeper and fuller as they sit together in the water, and the color returns to his strained face, and Shane watches in fascination as his eyes begin to move behind his closed eyelids. The only warning he’s given is a small twitch in the merman’s tail and another low, confused moan, before-

Shane’s looking at his face so intently that it almost makes him jump when the merman opens his eyes for the first time, but he stops himself just in time. The merman blinks a few times, squinting from the bright sunlight, and then his eyes move over to Shane’s face, and Shane feels his breath catch in his throat. If he thought the rest of this guy was beautiful, his eyes take him to an entirely new level- a rich, warm brown with flecks of red and gold deep within them, the same colors as the scales on his tail. He’s literally glowing now that he’s been in the water for a while and healed up well, and Shane distantly realizes that he’s possibly made a horrible, horrible mistake.

There’s only another moment of peace between them, where Shane looks into the merman’s eyes with astonishment, and the merman looks back in a daze, but then he flexes his tail and seems to realize that Shane is holding onto him, and his eyes go cold.

The merman thrashes in Shane’s light hold, and as soon as Shane moves his hands away, holding them up in front of him, the merman is sliding through the water, putting a gaping distance between them. Shane’s surprised when the merman stops and turns back to him, instead of disappearing altogether, but even from farther away Shane can see the look on his stunning face: distrust, a little curiosity, and more subtly, fear.

So Shane does what he does best, and talks.

“I’m sorry if I scared you,” he starts, hands still help up in the air. The merman shrinks away more, but still doesn’t slip away; Shane takes it as the victory it probably isn’t. “I didn’t mean to make you upset or overstep any boundaries. But I was walking on the beach and I found you caught in a fishing net and bleeding pretty badly. I just wanted to get you out of the net and back into the water so you could heal, or whatever. I’m still not really sure how that works. Or that you’re real.”

The merman stares at him for a few heartbeats, and Shane wonders if he’s able to understand what he’s saying, or if he’s just talking and talking without any real accomplishments being made. He feels like he should ask if the merman can understand him, but now that the guy is conscious and they’re staring each other down, he feels that usual stutter of awkwardness that makes him choke up in front of other people if they look too closely at him.

Just as he’s about to apologize like a moron and get out of the water and pretend that he fell asleep on the beach and is dreaming, the merman slips closer, fucking _smirks_ at him, and says:

“You bet your ass I’m real, buddy, and I think you know I am, seeing as how you were holding onto me by _my_ ass.”

Well.

Shane feels a new kind of flustered at hearing the merman speak for the first time and being called a weirdo all in one go.

“I was- I was _not_ holding onto you by your ass,” Shane says, and crosses his arms to hide that his hands are trembling. “I had my hand on your lower back at best. Would you rather have had me not holding you at all? Or holding onto your tail?”

The merman’s face pales again, and Shane feels a little bad for joking about that, but now he’s embarrassed and kind of freaking out.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean- I’m sorry. I’m not used to finding out that merpeople are real and capable of handing me _my_ ass by shaming.”

For a second, Shane thinks that the merman is going to split for real, or possibly drown him, but then he swims a little closer, close enough that Shane can see the flecks of gold in his eyes again, and smiles a small, beautiful smile.

“I take it you’re a fan of merpeople?” the guy asks, not even trying to hide the shit-eating grin forming on his face.

“More like a skeptic, but sure, I like a cool mermaid every once in a good while.” Shane’s proud of how steady his voice comes out, but that goes directly to shit when the merman slithers close enough for them to be in touching distance. They stare at each other up close, different from when the merman was unconscious, but also not. Shane’s head feels a little more fuzzy now than it was before.

“I’m a merman,” the guy says quietly, still full of sass, and Shane’s eyes fall involuntarily to his shifting arms and the sharp point of his collarbone and his exposed chest.

“I can see that.” Shane says back, voice definitely shaking now, and when he licks his lips, the guy’s gleaming eyes follow the path of his tongue. “I was definitely under no other illusion.”

“I can see that.” is the merman’s answer to Shane’s very obvious thirsting, and he finds himself laughing.

The laugh catches in his throat when the merman gets right in his face, quick as an eel, and Shane watches numbly as he reaches out and puts his thumb right on Shane’s lips. He sits, frozen, and lets the merman stare back at him, thumb brushing back and forth over Shane’s mouth and a little onto his teeth, and then lets him move his hand around the rest of his face. The merman touches the apples of his cheeks and the bridge of his nose and the slant of his eyebrows, all with a sense of wonder that Shane still feels the most out of any other emotion, and he drinks in the sight of the merman’s dazzling eyes following his finger.  

“I’ve never been this close to a human before,” the merman admits, almost too quietly for Shane to hear it. “Well, besides whatever lead me to being trapped in that net. But that’s not really a pleasant experience, don’t you think?”

Shane has to swallow when he says “No.” back, just as quietly, and has to swallow again when the merman’s finger traces of the shape of the word on his mouth.

He lets the touching continue in silence as the merman touches his chin and ears and the slope of his throat, and when a wet, salty hand drags itself through his hair, Shane gathers up some courage.

“Why are you letting yourself get so close to me? I thought you would have skipped town the second you woke up.”

The merman snorts, an unpretty gesture to go with his pretty looks, and tugs lightly on an earlobe. “You’re different from the humans I’ve seen and the one or two I’ve interacted with. Other humans are loud and obnoxious and would skin me alive or sell me to the government the second they were given the chance to. You, on the other hand, cut me from my shackles and carried me back out into the ocean in the hopes that it would magically heal me.”

He traces under Shane’s eyes with both thumbs, so that Shane’s face is cupped between both of his hands, and he gives him a smile that could probably burn the world down. “Any other human would have killed me or taken me. You freed me.”

Shane doesn’t really have anything else to say to that, other than another breathless and dizzy: “Are you sure that you’re real?”

The merman looks at him, eyes wide and sparkling, before taking a hand off of Shane’s face and pulling one of Shane’s own hands away from his chest. Shane’s about to ask what he’s up to, explain that if he plans to take him down to Atlantis that Shane is actually kind of a shitty swimmer, when the merman places his hand right on the side of his tail and Shane’s throat closes up.

The scales feel smooth and warm under his hands, like coins left out in the sun, and as the merman moves his fins around or his torso, the tail also moves and reacts. It behaves like a strange pair of legs, another active part of the body, and it finally sinks in that Shane’s not having some sort of bizarre fever/sex dream.

“Do you believe me now?” the merman asks, and when Shane strokes a thumb over a scale, he inhales sharply, and Shane almost goes into cardiac arrest.

“I do believe that I do,” Shane tells him, voice all weird and tight, and even though he also seems to be affected, the merman grins at him.

“That’s what I thought.” The merman doesn’t move his hand away, so Shane doesn’t either, and they’re left staring with a hand on each other, the sound of waves crashing and seagulls calling out the only noise between them.

It could have been minutes or days when the merman speaks again, and Shane wouldn’t have known the difference. He can’t and won’t make himself break their eye contact or move his hand away from the guy’s warm, shifting tail.

“I know you saved me because you knew I needed help,” he starts, and when he gives Shane’s cheek another soft touch with the back of his knuckle, he realizes that it’s with _affection_ , and his brain short circuits. “But I need to be honest with you, I think.”

“Okay.” Shane replies, and hopes that he’s not about to get his world turned all the way over again.

The merman purses his lips and takes a few breaths, before announcing: “I’m actually the crown prince of my kingdom.”

“Is it called Atlantis?” Shane blurts out, because he’s a fucking idiot, but the merman doesn’t look offended. In fact, he looks intrigued.

“I haven’t heard of Atlantis. Is that a place that other humans have seen merfolk in before?”

“Something like that.” Shane tells him, lying right through his goddamn teeth.

The merman nods, and presses forwards. “It’s hard to pronounce the name of my kingdom in the common tongue, but you can call it Coquillage.”

Shane sounds out the word, the merman’s pleased smile and warm hand encouraging him. “Co-key-ej.”

“Perfect. Just like that.”

He’s feeling a little braver, so he lets himself ask: “Does the crown prince of Coquillage have a name? Or is that also hard to pronounce in the common tongue?”

The merman gives him a wicked grin, something that Shane _knows_ because it’s the same way he looks at Sara when he’s giving her a hard time. It makes something hot and uneven settle in the bottom of his stomach.

“You got me,” he says, dazzling eyes crinkled. “The name that fits best in the common tongue is Ryan.”

“Ryan,” Shane says, and where he meant to sound comical, he sounds adoring and wonderstruck. “Prince Ryan of Coquillage.”

“That’s me.” Ryan nods, and moves to rest both of his hands softly on Shane’s shoulders, thumbs pressed into the side of his neck. “Does the guy who saved my life have a name? Or is it too grounded in reality for my imaginary ears to understand?”

“It’s Shane,” he says, smiling the widest he’s ever smiled in his entire goddamn life. “I’m Shane of Illinois.”

“Is that also a kingdom?”

“Something like that,” he repeats, because he doesn’t know how much longer Ryan will stay with him, and he doesn’t want to waste his time explaining the basics of United States geography to this beautiful man with an equally beautiful mermaid tail.

Ryan opens his mouth to say something back, probably something sassy or cute (which are pretty much the same things, as far as Shane is concerned), but stops before he can get a word out. His head cocks to the side and his breathtaking eyes move away from Shane’s for the first time since he regained consciousness, and Shane’s about to ask what’s wrong, but his throat suddenly closes up. Whatever is it, it probably means that Ryan is going to have to leave, and Shane doesn’t want to hear him say the words, or watch him slink back into the water. He wants to be stuck in this endless loop of staring and touching and laughing with this incredible, somehow-real creature that he managed to save by pure luck.

When their eyes lock again, Shane can see the gold and ruby flecks dim, until nothing but the brown is showing, and his own heart sinks in response.

“I have to go,” Ryan whispers. “Now that I’m healed, my people are sending out a signal for me. They’ve been looking for me for a while now.”

“Okay,” Shane whispers back, and closes his eyes. For a second, he breathes in the salt air and seaweed smell, and tries to eternally save the feeling of Ryan’s scales and tail and his hands on Shane’s shoulders and face in his mind. When he opens them again, at the feeling of Ryan tracing over his eyelids, he finds the overwhelming sadness reflected back onto the merman’s face. “Make it back safely. I’m actually kind of terrible at swimming, so I won’t be able to come down and beat a shark off of you if it attacks.”

Ryan smiles, and swipes a thumb over his lips again. “Thank you for saving my life.”

“You don’t have to thank me. I think discovering that merpeople are real was enough of a thanks already.”

Ryan hums, a sliver of mischief returning to his face, and Shane hardly has time to ask what it’s for when Ryan says: “Actually, when a handsome man saves your life, where I’m from, a thank-you goes a little more like this.”

And then he presses in closer to Shane, the closest he’s been, and kisses him softly on the mouth. Shane gasps a little, but it just encourages Ryan to move even closer, until their lips are slotted perfectly together, and Christ-

Feeling a little silly and like he might be taking advantage of this strange, beautiful man, Shane pulls him closer with the grip he has on Ryan’s tail. Ryan makes a strangled noise against his mouth, and all Shane can feel, taste, or smell is Ryan, his sweet, salty mouth, the soothing warmth of his hands, the scent of the ocean in his skin and hair. It makes his stomach curl and dip with the movement of the water around them, and he uses his free hand to cup Ryan’s sun-warmed cheek, lets himself tangle his fingers into the back of Ryan’s damp hair to pull him even closer, until they’re molded together from their mouths to their hips. It’s a tame kiss by most standards, but the way it makes Shane’s insides crackle and burn is anything but soft.

When Ryan pulls away from him, a lot regretfully, he gives Shane one last smile full of his big, white teeth and glittering eyes, gives him another soft, quick kiss, and slips away like- well, like water through his hands.

“Wait!” Shane calls, sounding wild, and Ryan stops before he can dive back underwater. He looks at Shane like all he wants to do is go back, and Shane’s heart flips over in his too-tight chest. “Will I ever see you again?”

Ryan’s eyes shine like gemstones, even from the distance between them, and something in Shane settles.

“I don’t think that I’m going to be able to disappear after a kiss like that, buddy,” Ryan says, and Shane laughs because he can’t help it. “Do you want to see me again?”

“Yes,” is all he can say, so he doesn’t say “I want to see you every day for the rest of my life.”

He watches Ryan disappear underwater, and for a second, he thinks he’s just left Shane to wonder and hope, but he resurfaces seconds later with a rock in his hands. Shane watches silently as Ryan speaks to it, watches as it glows gold for a heartbeat, and then watches as he presses a kiss to its flat surface. Ryan looks over at him again, and without prompting, tosses the stone through the air right at him. For the first time in his life, Shane catches something without dropping it, and the stone is warm and humming lightly when he gets ahold of it.

"I’ll be able to communicate with you through that,” Ryan tells him, sliding farther away. “It’ll grow warm when I’m back at this part of the beach, and you’ll know to come.”

“I’ll see you later then.” Shane tells him, and so he doesn’t go swimming frantically after Ryan, presses a kiss to the stone as well. He can see Ryan’s flushed, pleased face even the feet apart that they are. Ryan stares at him across the water, looking on fire from the way the sun bathes him in the purest, most beautiful sunlight, and then he swims close again. As if he can’t stay away. He jerks a hand out of the water to pull Shane down to him again and they kiss each other in a more harried way, like they want to remember the taste of salt on each other’s lips forever. Ryan curls his fingers tightly around Shane’s shoulders and Shane cups one of his giant hands back around the nape of Ryan’s neck. They’re crushing their mouths together and the grip they have on each other is almost rough, but it makes Shane’s blood sing and his breath catch in his throat more than anything else has.

“I’ll see you later then.” Ryan parrots back, once they force themselves to separate again, and with one lingering, sweet look, slips back underwater for good. Shane sees one last glint of his scales against the afternoon sun, and then nothing but the endless blue water.

Shane remains sitting for another handful of minutes, staring out at the spot that Ryan disappeared. He’s got the stone clenched almost painfully in his hand, hoping that it will suddenly burn hot or that Ryan will suddenly reappear from the depths of the water, but nothing happens, and Shane continues to sit and stare out into the endless stretch of ocean water.

He gets up when he finally begins to feel the cramp in his legs from kneeling for so long. His body feels too heavy when he hauls it out of the water, but he looks down at the unassuming stone in his hands again, and thinks of the way Ryan tastes, and he can’t help but smile. His steps feel light when he walks back onto shore and he begins to make his way back to his towel, miles away from boulders that changed every aspect of his life, and he runs his thumb over the groves in the rock the same way Ryan ran his thumb over Shane’s mouth.

He loiters for another half an hour or so, hoping still that Ryan will beckon him back to the boulders, but when the stone remains cool, he eventually packs up and walks back to the house. He doesn’t even realize that he’s got a stupid little smile on his face still until he walks up to the front door and sees it grinning back at him in the small window.

His aunt asks him about it over dinner, noticing Shane’s extra cheerful demeanor right away when she comes back in from tinkering around in the yard.

“What’s got you in such a good mood, baby?” Aunt Jenny gives him her own stupid smile. “You see a cute boy on the beach today?”

Shane looks at her over their spread of local fish and homegrown vegetables, and thinks about telling her what he saw at the beach, telling her that he found an injured merman and basically nursed him back to health. Thinks about telling her that Ryan smells like summer and tastes like magic. But then he thinks about it possibly disappearing if he talks about it, the possibility of some gods of the universe taking Ryan away from him for tattling, so he just smiles sweetly and tells her:

“Something like that.”

while thinking of glowing amber, ruby, gold eyes and scales made of flame and a pair of salty, grinning lips. She doesn’t try to pry, and Shane is more than happy to let his encounter with a beautiful merman remain a secret, fingers still clenched around the stone in his pocket. He’ll tell her someday, he thinks- maybe as he’s signing away his life for a tail of his own or when Ryan becomes king and can no longer leave his kingdom for the whims of some dumbass human from Illinois.

When Shane goes to bed, hours later, he cracks his window open so that he can hear the ocean crash and turn while he sleeps. He lays in the moon-lit darkness and thinks about all of the stories Aunt Jenny ever told him about merpeople, about how they have voices more beautiful than angels, about how underwater, they look like angels, about how trading in a pair of legs for their tail is the same as him trading in his eyes for two extra hands. The stone rests comfortably in his sweatpants pocket, and as he drifts off, he thinks about the shape of Ryan’s smile and the feeling of his scales under the sun and Shane’s trembling hand. He dreams of the same things.  

At breakfast the next morning, Shane innocently asks Jenny about merpeople folklore and the stories she told him as a kid, and as the day stretches on and the stone stays cold in Shane’s shorts, he hears more about merpeople in one day than he ever did as a kid who was more interested in dragons and aliens.

“What’s with the sudden interest in mermaids?” she asks him while they’re picking out the ripe asparagus from her garden. “Out of all the mythical creatures I’ve told you about, mermaids always interested you the least.”

Shane thinks about Ryan’s sunset scales; he’s been thinking of nothing else for the last 24 hours. “Oh, it’s nothing. When I went to the beach yesterday, I just- thought about merpeople while swimming a little. I was just wondering.”

She nods and launches into some other story about star crossed lovers who either had to give up their legs or their tail and how someone always ended up bitter and angry. Shane tries to think about Ryan’s brilliant, glowing grin through the harrowing stories. She must see his less than enthusiastic reaction to the sad stories, because she ends up scooting closer and hip-checking him over a batch of spinach.

“A long face for my sad, long story? You’ve grown soft, sunshine.”

“You mean I’ve grown a heart?”

Aunt Jenny laughs. “How about I tell you a story about soulmates?”

She then tells him a story about a human and merman who met one night when the human was feeling restless and lost and decided to storm into the ocean to swim out his anger. The merman discovered him screaming and writhing around in the water, trying to find solace in whatever was causing him pain, and despite the obvious differences between them, the human and merman were able to console each other. It lead to many nights spent together and the human and merman falling in love with each other and a bit of magic that allowed the human and merman to shift easily between human and mer-form to let them to stay together.

“Two men?” Shane asks her quietly.

“Yeah, baby. I thought you’d like that.”

Shane, full of love and a renewed sense of longing, looks over at his aunt. “Did they live happily ever after?”

“Of course.” She meets his look over her over vibrant tomato plants; her smile is sweet and daring, the same way it always is, but is also filled with that streak of mischief that caught his eye days before. “True love always wins. You’ll meet your soulmate someday and you’ll be with him for the rest of your life. Just you wait.”

Shane waits until she’s occupied with the tomatoes again before reaching a trembling hand into his pocket and gripping onto the cool stone. He has some weird, troubling suspicion that his aunt _knows_ about Ryan, or knows that something extraordinary has happened to Shane, and while he doesn’t really know what to do with it now, he thanks anyone and everyone that he has his easy, loyal, compassionate Aunt Jenny in his life.

**_~.~.~_ **

It takes almost five days for Ryan’s stone to turn warm again.

Shane spends most of these days at the beach, reading and staring out into the ocean and waiting, waiting, waiting for a sign. On this particular afternoon, he’s dozing lightly to Dustin Tebutt’s music when something starts vibrating against his bare side. He thinks, at first, that it’s his phone going off, but then he realizes that the sensation is more of a hum than a vibration, and it startles him out of his sleep. He fishes the stone out of his pocket and almost yells out loud when he discovers that it’s warm and humming, just like when Ryan first threw it to him.

He gets up from his blanket and sprints down towards the boulders where he saved Ryan from the fisherman’s net. He’s not really an athletic person, but knowing that Ryan is waiting for him makes him feel like he could fly, and he practically does, running as fast as he can down the beach to where the most beautiful man he’s ever seen in his life is waiting for him.

The humming increases as Shane gets closer to the boulders, and when he reaches them, bare feet scratching against the sun-warmed stones, it calms, before disappearing all together. For a moment, he’s confused and his heart sinks, but then he sees a sudden flash of copper and gold and his heart lurches up into his throat.

Ryan breaches the surface of the water with a giant smile plastered across his face and his tail peeking out behind him, a gorgeous, breathtaking swatch of fire across the cool blue of the sea, and Shane is helpless. He grins back with all of his teeth and stumbles his way off of the boulders.

“Are you coming out or what, Shane of Illinois?” Ryan calls, and Shane _finally_ understands the pull of a siren’s song. “I’ve been waiting a long time.”

“ _You’ve_ been waiting?” Shane asks, laughing, and then he dives right underwater.

He wants to open his eyes up and see Ryan’s tail in the middle of the cerulean of the water, but knows that it’ll sting more than it’ll impress, so he stays under to cool off and then pushes back up to the surface. When he comes up again, Ryan is right there in his space to push the hair back off of his forehead and grab onto his freckled shoulders. If Shane thought he was breathtaking before, it’s nothing compared to the tightening in his chest now.

“At least you live in a grandioso kingdom,” Shane tells him, trying to hide the fact that he really can’t pull all the breath into his lungs. “I’m sure you were busy being doted on by your people and telling them that some big olf from above saved your life. I just sat on the beach and read and waited to see you again.”

Ryan looks incredibly pleased to hear this admission from him. “You really spent all this time waiting for me?”

“Of course,” Shane says, softer, thinking about Aunt Jenny’s soulmates story. “I haven’t stopped thinking about you.”

“Is it because I’m a merman?”

Shane looks into his ruby-flecked eyes and down at his cute, smiling lips, and snorts. “Absolutely not.”

Ryan’s pleased look liquifies. “For your information, I _was_ really waiting and hoping to see you again, too. I love my people and my insufferable, protective baby brother, but sometimes my family can be suffocating. I wanted to see you the entire time I was back home.”

Shane feels his heart soar at these words. “Really? You’d rather see me than your family? Friends? Even after being attacked?”

“I already told you-” Ryan cups his wet, warm hands around Shane’s equally warm, wet cheeks, and slithers closer. “You freed me.”

Shane really has no idea what’s going on or what they’re going to do with themselves; all he knows is that he has more than half the summer left with Aunt Jenny, and and sometime in there, he can figure out what they should do. For now, he just laughs and tells Ryan: “You freed me, too, in so, so many ways,” and hauls Ryan up to kiss him. His head is still spinning a little, trying to wrap around the fact that merpeople are real, that _Ryan_ is real, but the way he can feel Ryan smiling against his mouth and taste the salt on his tongue and feel the tissue-thin texture of his fins sliding against his bare leg is so vivid it makes stars spark behind his closed eyes. And when he finally pries them open again, after kissing Ryan one, two, three more times, and sees the way his eyes are flooded with gold and his teeth are whiter than the sun, he knows that real or not, he’s going to do anything he possibly can to hold onto this beautiful, amazing being.

They sit in the water for a few moments without saying anything, just staring at and touching each other, when Shane remembers something else his Aunt Jenny told him once.

“Hey, Ryan of Coquillage?”

Ryan hums. “Yeah?”

“Is the Kraken real?”

Ryan stares at him, mouth falling open and then pursing. At first, Shane thinks he just asked a question that shouldn’t be asked, but then he realizes that Ryan is trying not to _laugh_.

“How about you grow a tail so I can bring you down and let you find out?”

Shane takes that as a yes, and then internally curses when he realizes that he now owes Keith $10. “Is that a euphemism?”

The laugh is forced out of Ryan’s mouth, and he looks surprised even as he’s cackling loudly at Shane. “Christ, you humans really are disgusting. Maybe you don’t deserve a tail.”

“Are you implying that I can acquire one?”

Ryan’s large grin softens into a goofy smile. He drags one set of knuckles up Shane’s throat and settles his hand into the back of his head, uses his new hold to bring Shane down closer to him.

“It might take a while, but I’m sure I can figure something out. We’ve got a human-turned-mermaid in our family, so I know there’s a way to get you there.” Ryan’s easy smile falters, so subtle that Shane might not have noticed it if he wasn’t so fucking close to him, noses nearly brushing. “If that’s what you want.”

Shane thinks maybe he shouldn’t reply so boldly, since he doesn’t really even know Ryan that much, but then he hears Jenny’s tale about soulmates in his head again and thinks about how his heart stumbles and gallops in his chest when he kisses Ryan. Thinks: _fuck it._

“You’re what I want,” Shane tells him softly. “Whatever that entails.”

“Did you mean-” Ryan cuts off, and Shane presses forwards, gently squeezes where his hips melt into scales, is about to ask if he’s okay, but then Ryan finishes his sentence: “En-tails?”

“You-” Shane’s brain shuts off and turns back on like a lightbulb exploding. He’s laughing harder than he’s ever laughed in his entire life, but most of it is probably hysteria. “Did you just make a merperson pun?”

Ryan kisses his bottom lip. “There’s plenty more where that came from if you’re serious about trying this.”

He’s still giggling, but manages to get out: “Of course. We were mer-made for each other.”

Then they’re both laughing like idiots, sitting in the shallow end of the ocean with every part of their bodies touching. Shane feels it down to his human bones that Aunt Jenny was talking about them when she told him about those soulmates, and also feels that him and Ryan are going to make this work, somehow and some way.

He wants to know how the human in Ryan’s kingdom became a mermaid, wants to know everything about his history and the history of his people, but he also knows that it’ll takes weeks and months and years to learn everything about Ryan. So he starts with cupping Ryan’s grinning face in between his hands and giving him another deep, salty kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone who speaks French sorry I named Ryan’s kingdom seashell I thought it would be cute :< and I'm sorry if this is actually the worstiest but I had fun not taking it super seriously so I'm sorry if it was garbage fdsjafka I kinda want to continue on in this universe anyways so wooooo sorry friends!! Also I'd love to do some requests if anyone has any!!! My tumblr is @bodhirookes!!! ^_^


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